His Growing Desire
by MADAM BETH
Summary: For years after they've grown back together in District 12 following the war, Peeta has wanted to have children with Katniss. He's only outright asked her once but over the years, she's noticed another more subtle way he's been trying to let his feelings known.


"His Growing Desire"

By MADAM BETH

Written for the Prompts in Panem 7 Day challenge "The Language of Flowers"

Disclaimer: all of these characters belong to Suzanne Collins, I just borrow them for my own entertainment sometimes!

Day 7- Jonquil- "Desire"

To wish for or want a person or a thing, desire is described as the strong feeling associated with needs or longing. It may refer to sexual yearning or deep-seated ambition.

For years after they've grown back together in District 12 following the war, Peeta has wanted to have children with Katniss. He's only outright asked her once but over the years, she's noticed another more subtle way he's been trying to let his feelings known.

**Tombs – Joshua Mazur **

I walk about the path set by  
the patch of jonquil spring in bloom,  
Nice, now, there is not one save I,  
For the springtime flowers, 'tis just more room.

Down through the low and over high,  
the trees wave at their passerby  
and I, in happily settled tones,  
assure them it is a friend that roams.

And as I come to journey's end,  
I find that in the forest shade  
their peace, oh trees of sunshine tend  
however old, ne'er begin to fade.

For in the summer meadow's blooms,  
one shall find no dusty tombs.

It was almost exactly a year after the morning I'd run outside my house in Victor Village to find Peeta planting primrose bushes in honor of my sister, that I once again was stirred from a daydream by the methodic scrape and drag of a garden shovel.

It took me a moment to place the sound as it was buried behind a year's worth of healing my mind had gone through with the help of my Capitol head-shrink, Dr. Aurelius. Well, that and hundreds of big and little memories made with Peeta, whose planting of those primrose bushes had been what drove me out of the cocoon of sadness I'd wrapped myself in for months after returning to 12. When I realized what it was though, I sprinted out the front door thinking for a moment that I must be caught up in some sort of déjà vu scenario which I wish I could say was uncommon in those days, but it wasn't.

When I reached the top of the porch steps, there was no familiar pair of blue eyes peering up at me from amongst the buds on the primrose bushes that had just begun their first true sprout since being planted the previous year. I looked to the left and right in front of the house and didn't see him anywhere. This only added to the growing fear that the sounds I heard from inside the house were the beginning of some sort of episode connected to what Dr. Aurelius called my post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Peeta?" I called, trying to bite back the panic that had begun to creep into my words recently when I was unable to find him where I expected him to be.

When he didn't answer immediately, I called his name again and once more tried to keep my voice even. I did this partly because I didn't want to alarm him, and partly because _I_ found it alarming that in the short amount of time since we'd begun to really grow back together, I had become so dependent on Peeta for my peace of mind.

"What's wrong?"

I spun around on the porch and grabbed my chest when Peeta's voice surprised me from the side of the house that faced out towards the road to town. I tried to stifle the sigh of relief the made my chest noticeably heave beneath the light cotton t-shirt I'd pulled on with a pair of Peeta's cargo pants after my shower a few minutes earlier.

We had only been sharing a physical relationship for a little over 3 months at the time, so when Peeta leaned back on his haunches and pulled the hem of his shirt up to wipe some sweat from his brow, I felt a flush rise to my cheeks as I admired his taut abdomen. More to the point, I was thinking about how I had lightly raked my short fingernails over the muscles there while making love the night before and the confusing mix of relief at finding him and desire to have him take me right there on the lawn caused me to stutter out my next words.

"I…I…didn't know where you were…" I mumbled lamely with a shrug of my shoulders and kicked at a loose board on the porch that Peeta had mentioned he was going to fix that afternoon.

He spent most weekdays running the bakery that had been built with money we Victors received as a part of the new government's plan to rebuild our society from the one we'd all known under the rule of President Snow and the Capitol.

Peeta was proud of his new bakery and had spent part if not all of his workdays there since it had opened 6 months earlier, while I spent a good portion of my days hunting in the solace of my woods.

Neither of us mentioned it, but keeping to such familiar routines was part of the reason we were able to go on with living when the overwhelming pain of those we lost told us to just give up. It gave us a purpose in our waking hours and tired us out enough to keep the worst of our nightmares at bay through the night.

It wasn't long before we slipped back into other routines like working on my family's plant book and sharing a bed to protect one another from the nightmares that couldn't be quelled by the exhaustion of days spent keeping busy.

From the plant book, grew the idea of the memory book where we placed the faces and stories of those lost in the Games and the war that put an end to them. From the comfort and safety we experienced protecting each other's sleep once again, grew the buds of renewed love and the desire to feel something other than the crushing despair of loss.

Slowly, like a flower unfolding in the sunlight, hands that had been clasped together tight to let us know someone was there protecting us in the dark loosened in the night and began to roam over places on the other's body no one else's hands had ever been permitted to touch.

On the night we finally gave in to the passion and pleasure we'd been denying ourselves as punishment for surviving when those we loved had perished, I told Peeta I loved him and I'm almost certain his damaged mind believed it. Just to be certain, I made sure to tell him at least twice a day so that perhaps my feelings for him might too become a normal part of his routine and not something he felt he had to question for even a moment of hijacked confusion.

I felt a flush rising to my cheeks as I watched Peeta stand from his position kneeling amongst our side flower bed, his fitted white undershirt smudged with dirt, outlining the muscles he'd regained from proper eating and the manual labor that came with trying to run a bakery almost completely on his own.

I'd talked him into hiring two young men to help with the day to day tasks. I knew he was loathe to admit it, but it turned out to be a wonderful idea once the start of our physical relationship led us both to forego working and hunting on the weekends to make more time for our new 'hobby'.

Of course Haymitch made plenty of crude jokes when he first realized both of us were suspiciously scarce around town on Saturdays and Sundays, but Peeta and I could tell he was happy to see we'd found our way back to each other on our own terms. I suspected that he might have even knocked a decade or two off of those thousand lifetimes he believed I'd have to live before deserving Peeta.

My flush deepened when I caught Peeta's eyes roving quickly over the length of my body and saw a small, proud smirk appear when he noticed I was wearing a pair of his pants with the light, long-sleeved shirt I'd pulled on after my shower.

I'd left him sleeping in our bed, hoping to let him rest a little longer after the passionate celebration of our first day off the night before. He was up so early for work at the bakery during the week so I made an extra effort on the weekends to make my way quietly around the house in hopes that he would sleep. When I finished my shower, I hadn't been surprised to see his internal baker's clock had woken him but I was a little surprised not to find him anywhere downstairs.

I hadn't thought much of it except to assume he was probably in his art studio which had been converted from one of the extra bedrooms upstairs. That was until I was startled out of a daydream while waiting for the coffeepot to fill by that familiar scraping and dragging of the shovel outside.

"Oh, well…sorry about that." He said looking genuinely apologetic as he stopped a few feet away, looking up at me on the porch from where he stood. We both had been trying to be more mindful of letting the other know where we were going and I could tell Peeta was going to be beating himself up for a few days for causing me undue stress by leaving the house without telling me.

"I…I think I ordered some flower bulbs during one of my…my bad days this winter…" he said and I nodded, not wanting or needing him to explain any further because I knew he often did things when he locked himself away during a hijacking episode that he didn't remember later.

I could tell by the appreciative little smile he gave me that he was glad I understood. "…so when I came downstairs and saw them on the porch beside the paper, I guess I kind of got over excited and wanted to put them in right away.." he said finally closing the distance between us and wrapping his arms loosely around my hips with his face pressed against my stomach where I stood on the porch.

"It's sorta fun when I order things to make me feel better during an episode that I won't remember later…" He murmured through my shirt and I took him by the sides of his head and made him pull back so that I could see the grin threatening to spread over his face.

"…it's like getting a present from myself and I have no clue what's inside!" He joked and I rolled my eyes and reached down to tug on one of his earlobes, scolding him playfully for making light of what I still saw as a haunting reminder of the torture he'd endured at the hands of the Capitol.

"Soooo…not funny, Peeta." I growled and then screeched when he lifted me effortlessly and let me slide down his front until my feet touched the spring-softened earth.

"But you still love me, right?" He asked with a nervous smile as he looked down into my eyes, squinting slightly from the bright light of sunrise.

"Mmmm…I guess so." I whispered and brought my arms up and folded them behind his neck. I reached up to give him a long kiss 'good morning' and Peeta responded easily to it.

"Good morning to you, too." Peeta murmured in a voice still carrying enough rasp from a good night's sleep to make areas south of my navel quake even though they were still sore from the previous night's exertions.

Not wanting to give his already raging 19-year-old hormones an excuse to drag me back to bed and ensure that I was sore until mid-week, I diverted his (and my) attention back to the subject of the flower garden.

"So what kind of flowers are you planting?" I asked and released him to walk along the side of the house towards the area he'd been digging.

"Jonquils." Peeta said bending to pick up a cardboard box and angling it towards me so that I could see the similarly sized pile of bulbs inside that were tumbling back and forth across the bottom.

I frowned and searched my extensive mental database of plants for an image to go with the name and was surprised to come up empty which I could see pleased Peeta to no end. It was usually me teaching the lessons of the natural world to him, so he jumped on the opportunity to impart some nature smarts to me.

"They're a sort of dark yellow flower." He said with his best impression of what I recognized as Beetee, the former Hunger Games Victor from District 3's professor-like tone. I chuckled when he pretended to push imaginary glasses I pictured as the black-rimmed ones Beetee wore back on nose.

"They grow on a long stem with a fluke standing out sort of like a trumpet and a star-shaped frill of petals framing it." He explained and because Peeta could paint as beautiful and clear an image with his words as with a paintbrush, I was able to immediately picture the flowers he described.

"Oh! I know those, but my dad called them daffodils." I said and Peeta nodded as he knelt back down to continue his work.

"Right, they're very similar." He said still with the teacher-ly tone and turned his attention to the front of the house clearing his throat. "Thought the color would go well with the bushes out front and I figured it couldn't hurt to add more color to this…" he waved a disgusted hand in the direction of the dark, stone exterior of the utilitarian Victor's Village house we called home "cold, drab stone."

I sometimes wondered if we should move to a house we could build all on our own, where Peeta's artistic talents would lend themselves to a more cheerful, homey place to spend our lives. It was always a fleeting thought though because I would soon remember that it was the last physical connection to my little sister apart from a mangy, moody orange tabby who insisted on sharing my memories of Prim by taking up residence in the house with us.

"That sounds like a great idea." I said softly and placed a hand on top of his mop of blonde hair. I ran my fingers through his sweaty bangs as a sort of silent thank you for the bushes I'd never expressed enough gratitude to him for planting the year before when I was still so closed off emotionally.

"Want me to bring you some coffee?" I asked over my shoulder as I left him to his work and headed back around the front of the house.

"Uhh…nah, but I'll take some tea if we have it…cream but no…" I cut him off as I turned to climb the steps up to the front door with a proud little smile of my own.

"…no sugar, I know." I grinned and the smile he returned almost made me forget the tea, the flowers, and that soreness I mentioned and _ask_ him to take me back to bed, but I kept my own raging 19-year-old hormones in check and went reluctantly back inside to make his tea alone.

The flowers bloomed just before summer and I complimented Peeta on his three fine rows of little yellow soldiers, teasing him for the care he'd taken to make sure they were straight and evenly spaced. I told him the garden looked like a baking sheet of flower shaped cookies spaced to leave them room to plump up when they were baked. He blushed when I said this and rolled his eyes when I'd tease him about the way he spoke to the flowers when he watered them on days we'd gone without rain. Teasing aside, I slowly started to sense that he was happy to have something to take care of. I had gotten much better about sharing my weaknesses with him, but there were still parts of me that I was too stubborn or thought were too sad to share with Peeta when he'd already been through so much himself.

I didn't think much else of it except to think that it was nice for Peeta to have found purposeful work for hands I knew he still felt were too idle, and a mind he was still working to repair. I was sure he would have focused more of this attention on Buttercup, but the cat remained pretty indifferent to the two of us for a few years except when he needed to be let back into the house on chilly nights or when he smelled bacon cooking in the kitchen a few mornings a week.

We continued with our routines into the second year back home in 12. Peeta baked, I hunted and when the bitter cold of winter (as well as Peeta's requests that I use the town butcher for most of our meat during that time of year rather than risk my health in the elements) kept me from hunting, I began helping Peeta out at the bakery and learning the trade myself. It took a little getting used to, but eventually I became confident enough at putting together ingredients that one day Peeta decided to change the name of the bakery to "The Mellark and Everdeen Bakery".

"You know, you didn't need to do that…it wasn't my family's trade, it was yours…" I'd said after admiring the sign at the end of the day it'd been placed above the front door.

Peeta had shrugged and wrapped his arms around me from behind, resting his chin on my shoulder and taking a deep breath. I should have sensed what was coming next because I could feel his heart pounding against my back and felt the slight tremble going through his body.

"Well, you _are _my family now so I guess that makes it your family's trade as well." He whispered and turned me in his arms slowly so that I was looking up slightly into his face. "I'd really like to…to make you _officially_ my family…" He said and dropped his eyes to the side and laughed nervously. "I just wasn't sure if I should ask Buttercups permission first or…" He groaned when I pushed back from him a little and wrapped my arms around my body protectively.

"Katniss…I'm sorry, I shouldn't have just…just sprung that on you…" he said and I shook my head and looked down at my worn winter boots sadly.

"No…it's not your fault, Peeta, it's just me…I'm….I'm a mess…" I said with a humorless laugh and Peeta stepped forward slowly, closing the gap between us again and took my face between his hands.

"No you're not…you just still need some time to see that our world is getting better and that I don't ever plan to be without you in it…" he said with such easy confidence that I was almost able to let myself believe what he was saying; that there would come a day when I'd be able to give him more than just my present heart. A day when I would feel safe enough to promise my future to him as well.

"I'm sorry…"I said looking apologetically into his eyes and reached up to wrap a hand around one of his wrists.

"Me too…" he whispered back and I sensed his apology was not so much for the veiled proposal, but for the hand we'd been dealt in life that was keeping me from seeing that things could get better.

Rather than head back out into the blowing wind and snow that had been lashing at the front windows of the bakery all day, I led Peeta upstairs to the little apartment he'd had built above the bakery and showed him just how sorry I was with my body because I still had trouble doing so with my words.

A few months later, I awoke again to the scrape and drag of a shovel singing in harmony with the spring birds who had only returned a week or so before. Instead of running outside this time though, I simply stuck my head out of an upstairs window over the side of the house to see Peeta planting another three rows of bulbs.

When I asked him over breakfast later that morning what kind of flowers they were this time, he said that they were more jonquils, but that these ones had a dark yellow trumpet and white petals making up the frilly collar behind it.

The next spring brought more bulbs to the front porch and another 3 rows of jonquils to that side garden. Peeta watered them all, kept the bed around them free of weeds and the types of bugs that might harm them, all the while still talking to them. It might have been my imagination, but I felt with each passing year, the blossoms grew larger and fuller, proudly displaying the beauty they'd achieved under such capable, caring hands as those of my baker.

In the seventh year of planting new jonquils, I snipped a few from the back rows that now reached around the house into our back yard and took them next door where I planned to place them in a discarded liquor bottle with some water and a powdery concoction meant to keep them fresh and alive longer.

I may have added a bit extra considering I was asking them to stay alive in Haymitch's home which was kept just barely habitable for him to continue living there much less any other flora or fauna apart from the occasional patch of mold or field mouse.

While I was rinsing out the bottle to fill with water, Haymitch began snickering to himself in the condescending way I hated because its cheerfulness carried the implication that he knew something I didn't. I took that as an insult since Haymitch was aware of very little during his inebriated daytime life. I tried to ignore him at first until I turned from the sink to find him twirling one of the flowers from the bouquet I'd carried over between two of his fingers grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

"I already regret this, but, what's so funny?" I asked with a frown and swiped the flower from his hand and placed its stem down the neck of the bottle before taking the rest one and a time and doing the same.

"These flowers…" He said tapping a brittle, bitten fingernail against the side of the bottle I was using for a vase.

"Jonquils." I said quickly, never one to pass up letting him know when I knew something he didn't.

"Right, right…jonquils…" he rasped and then cleared his throat and leaned forward in his chair to take a whiff of their perfume. "Very pretty flowers…" he sighed and dropped back into his chair, already lifting the top of a new bottle to his lips. "Very meaningful ones too.." he said cryptically just before his first gulp.

I knew he was baiting me and despite my usual distaste for this dangling-carrots-of-information-for-me-to-try-and-grasp-at game, a part of my brain that had quietly spent almost a decade trying to puzzle out the reason Peeta planted so many of the same type of flower in our gardens each spring got the best of me and I rose to the temptation of what my former mentor might have to share.

"Meaningful? How?" I asked trying to sound only superficially interested in what he had to say as I busied myself with arranging the flowers just so.

"Well, sweetheart, if I'm not mistaken…" he said with a yawn that told me he was trying to project the same aloofness as I was. "…jonquils are the flower of desire." He said and grinned when my head snapped his way, betraying how interested in what he had to say I actually was.

I turned back to the flowers and stared down at them, thinking how the first set of bulbs had been ordered by Peeta while he was experiencing an episode. Could he have known, even in that state, the meaning behind that particular species of flower and ordered them as some kind of message to me?

"That head doctor you talk to in the Capitol might say based on the army of them that boy has planted over the years he's working through some deep, unfulfilled desire." He said and looked as pointedly at me as Haymitch has ever been able to manage while knock down drunk.

"Perhaps a desire he's got to keep to himself because he doesn't want to upset the person who could help him realize it." Haymitch whispered and reached for the bottle/vase I was gripping tightly between my palms.

He had to gently pry my fingers off of one side of it in order to place them as the centerpiece to his table and we just looked at them silently for a long time, Haymitch sitting and occasionally taking drags off of his bottle and me standing dumbly wondering how I could have been so blind to my lover's needs.

The message couldn't have been clearer once my attention had been drawn to it; Peeta's casual proposal years earlier in the bakery hadn't been him just seeing the next logical step in the progression of our relationship. He wanted to marry me so badly that he had to channel all of that excess desire into planting and caring for those dozens and dozens of jonquils that now wrapped around nearly three sides of our home.

"Peeta wants to marry me." I blurted out after almost five minutes of silence and Haymitch raised first his eyebrows and then the bottle of liquor he'd been nursing since I walked in.

"No shit." He grunted and handed me the bottle which I then took a long draw from.

I didn't want Peeta to know that Haymitch and I had solved the riddle of his interest in botany so I waited a few days, searching my own heart for any reason why, after so long, Peeta didn't deserve the security and peace of mind he so obviously was seeking in wanting me to be his wife.

I thought of my mother and father and how in love they had been. So in love in fact, that when my father died in a mining accident, my mother nearly died herself. It was as if her heart had literally broken in two and there were not enough pieces of the remaining whole for her to be able to go on without him. In my innocence and horrified by what I saw his death do to my mother, I promised myself that I would never allow myself to love someone that much. Of course, I hadn't counted on the kindness a baker's son would show me a few months later or on the stubbornness of my own heart to overpower the logic my brain promised me with that decision to never fall in love.

At nearly 8 years into our living together practically _as _married people, it seemed silly to try and deny by that point that my heart remained solely in my possession anymore.

When I could come up with no reasons not to and so many reasons it made sense not only in Peeta's point-of-view, but in my own, I left one of the flowers on his dinner plate one summer evening. The stem was threaded through two simple silver wedding bands I'd asked Effie Trinket to discreetly send to me from a jeweler in the Capitol. Beside his plate I'd placed a loaf of bread I baked that was the same type he'd thrown to me in the rain when I'd slumped starving and defeated against a tree beside the bakery when we were children.

I wrapped it loosely in a cloth that had my family name and my mother's maiden name, indicating that it was the same cloth that was wrapped around the bread at my parents' own toasting.

I was standing at the stove stirring a pot of gravy for the meatloaf I'd made for dinner when he entered the house, already calling out to me that he had a great story to tell me about one of his apprentice bakers backing into a tray of chocolate cupcakes. I called back that I couldn't wait to hear so he started telling the story as I heard him kicking off his shoes by the front door and making his way down the hall to the kitchen. As his voice got closer, I had to bite my lip to hide the excitement on my face even though I had my back to him.

"….and he was wearing a brand new pair of…" I bit my lip harder when Peeta's story abruptly stopped when he came through the kitchen door and must have spotted the flower, rings and bread.

I didn't turn around for a few moments, waiting to see what he would say. Would he ask what they were? Would he be afraid to assume and not say anything at all?

I was suspecting the second option was correct when he didn't respond after a few agonizing seconds so I turned my head slowly to look at Peeta where he seemed rooted to the floor a foot into the room.

Instead of confusion or disbelief being written across his face like I'd expected, I was met with the most openly adoring smile I'd ever seen from another human being. Even in all my time as the darling of the Capitol as part of the pretend star-crossed lovers of District 12, I had never seen such an astonishingly joyful look directed my way.

"You're serious? You…want to marry me?" He asked with such heartbreaking reluctance to let his true feelings show in case his assumption had been wrong that I couldn't bear the act for one more second.

I dropped the wooden spoon I'd been using to stir the gravy into the pot, nodded excitedly, and ran full tilt at him until I was close enough to leap into his arms. Just as we had at the beginning of the Victory Tour during which I'd begun to fall in love with him for real on, we toppled to the ground under the unexpected buckling of his artificial leg (which I still sometimes forgot about since he'd had such strong command of it for so long).

I landed on top of him with an 'oof' from me and a laugh of untamed delight from Peeta.

"When?" He asked chuckling as I settled myself more comfortably on top of him and looked down into his eyes.

"Now…tomorrow….twelve o'clock, a.m. or p.m." I grinned and leaned in to kiss him soundly. "…next week, whenever you want, that's when I'll marry you." I whispered and Peeta's hands slid to my lower back, pressing my lower body into his and deepening the kiss I started.

"I love you, Katniss." He whispered reverently when we came up for air.

"I love you too, Peeta." I said and kissed my way down his neck, leaving the gravy to burn onto the sides of the pot.

We did marry, four days later which was just enough time for Haymitch to dry out in order to be one of our witnesses, and Katniss's mother to arrive in 12 to act as the other.

It was quick, quiet, and quaint (my three favorite verbs to describe any type of event that was likely to draw unwanted attention to us) and the only camera present was our personal one which was used by our cameraman for the day (who also happened to be one of Peeta's apprentices at the bakery).

The marriage didn't mean as much to me ceremonially as I was certain it meant to Peeta, but the effect it had on him made my heart swell with happiness. Even though I chose to keep Everdeen as my last name, having a piece of paper to hold in his hands that told Peeta we were legally joined was enough to satisfy him to the point his hijacking episodes became less and less frequent.

Despite that, three springs later I was surprised to once again awaken one morning to the scrape and drag of a shovel, this time on the other side of the house. I crept to the window of Peeta's art studio and peeked out to see him on hands and knees. He was making those evenly spaced holes and gently tucking in the little bulbs that would grow into the beautiful flowers which, with the addition of the ones he was planting below me at that moment, would nearly have our house completely surrounded.

Watching the care and pride with which he handled the juvenile form of the pretty yellow and white jonquils gave me an inkling as to what the new desire burning in his heart was for.

I looked behind me in the room at the array of recent sketches and paintings Peeta had been working on and tried my best not to notice the vibrant detail he'd put capturing the children who were regulars at our bakery in pencil, paint and charcoal.

Since our wedding 3 years earlier, our neighbors in 12, and the government officials we were required to keep in contact with as part of the agreement that we be free to live our lives outside of the public eye, had occasionally inquired into whether we would be having any children.

I became a professional selectively hearing impaired individual in these instances, which often meant Peeta was left to field such questions when they were tossed our way.

He would smile and look away to hide the pain of knowing this was something I might never be able to give him and smooth things over with the kind of non-answer Peeta was so good at giving while making the asker think they'd received insider information on the topic.

I knew his charisma would only get us so far in avoiding their questions. I also knew that Peeta himself didn't have an answer to give them since I had managed to dodge nearly every conversation he tried to have with me about kids since we'd been living together.

It was the one remaining piece of the Katniss I had been before the Games that I was unable to detach myself from completely.

Of course I enjoyed the children who seemed to always be hanging around our bakery. I was especially fond of the ones who frequented the bakery in those early days. The children who had spent most of their young lives with noses pressed longingly to the windows of bakeries and sweet shops because such delicacies were admired but rarely eaten by District children in the days of the Capitol's rule.

Our bakery remained a popular stop for children on their trips through town on the way to and from school, and while I was pleased to see their smiling faces and round bellies, it seemed as though Peeta's whole being lit up from the inside out when there were children around. It made me feel guilty enough to try and seek help for my stubbornness.

I'd had phone call after phone call with Dr. Aurelius, Haymitch had spent a good deal of his lucid hours trying to convince me that we were far enough removed from the revolution and war to safely bring a child into the world, and my mother had just as big of eyes for a grandchild as Peeta had for a child of his own.

None of those interventions in the nearly 15 years since we'd been truly together as a couple had done much to sway me to change my mind…until I was leaning out the window watching my husband burry more of the bulbs that so obviously signified his wish to become a father.

I turned back to look the room over and couldn't stop the smile sneaking up onto my face.

I let my eyes wander over picture after picture of the happy, cherubic faces that Peeta had captured on canvas and loose paper alike. There were images of stubby hands with plump fingers pressed against the display cases leaving greedy little prints behind. There were frosting smeared lips and soft cookies with child-sized bites taken out of them. There were gap-toothed grins, jeans with holes worn in the knees from exploration in the woods, and band aids from games that garnered no rougher battle wounds than a scraped elbow from a bike race or a bruised knee from a rough hopscotch landing.

When I told the story to Peeta a few years later, lying in bed with our toddler daughter snuggled between us and a son who didn't yet understand the meaning of the word 'bedtime' doing somersaults in my uterus, I skimmed over the part about seeing him planting the flowers. He knew from the time I finally agreed to marry him that I had figured out the reason for the yellow flowers planted every spring. I only briefly mentioned all of the pictures of children around his art studio, painted by his hand that had helped to give me the courage to admit my own desire for the sound of children's laughter in our home.

What had finally pushed me to cut the last string tethering my heart to a world my damaged psyche wasn't certain was safe enough to bring a child into was a small canvas painting of one of those children who regularly visited the bakery being handed a cookie over the counter…by me.

I thought I actually might have remembered the day he'd captured so clearly like a snapshot from my brain. I was leaning over the counter, one elbow holding me up and forward as I stretched to hand the cookie to the small blonde boy of about five-years-old. He was looking up at me with a mixture of shyness, gratitude and maybe a hint of school-boy crush.

My heart immediately constricted as I thought of another fair-haired boy who had already loved me at that age and who had spent every minute of the past decade and a half working to rebuild the room in his hijacked mind that still held that love.

It wasn't the little boy and his likeness to Peeta at the same age that led me to whisper across our pillows that night that I wanted to have a child with him. The child was adorable and his resemblance to Peeta, uncanny, but what changed my mind was the look on my _own_ face in the painting.

It was the same look I'd tried to avoid bringing attention to when I saw it on Peeta's face each time he interacted with children. It was an unguarded, honest look born of the happiness I felt in being able to bring some joy to a young and innocent life. It was in that moment that I realized Peeta had known even before I did that I wanted to have a child of my own with him.

I don't know how long I stood in front of the painting with the summer breeze causing lazy ripples to move through the sheer curtains of the window I could still hear Peeta digging beneath. When I finally came to my senses and felt the lightening of a large weight being lifted off my shoulders, I headed downstairs and out the front door, moving as if on autopilot until I was on the side of the house watching the easy care with which Peeta planted the bulbs of his Jonquils.

"Can I help?" I asked in so quiet a breath, I wondered at first if Peeta had heard what I said.

He sat back on his haunches and brushed his hands off on the jeans he was wearing before turning his eyes up to mine, searching them easily for any sign of hesitation or regret for what he was sure I was trying to tell him.

He must have found what he was looking so intensely for in my eyes, because he smiled his full thousand-watt Peeta Mellark smile and held out a hand to help me down onto my knees beside him and handed me a trowel and a bulb.

As I dug and set bulbs down in the methodical way I'd watched Peeta doing, I thought about how this parenting thing might not be as bad an idea as originally suspected as long as I had the man beside me to help me.

When I made a remark and asked Peeta if he felt the bulbs we spaced enough for 'baking' or if I should serenade them from the window once we were back inside the house, Peeta used the tip of his trowel to scoop up the tiniest big of dirt and flung it at me where it hit me on the shoulder.

I gasped and did the same back at him and our playfulness turned very quickly into a full-fledged dirt fight with little bits of the rich, brown soil landing amongst the flowers of years past that were just beginning to bloom new and filled with hope.

The last thing I remember thinking before I screeched when Peeta sacked me into the grass and began kissing me all over my face and neck was how more than once now, this boy, this man, had changed my life with the help of simple yellow flowers.


End file.
